Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2021, and the Iron Book Discussion Group will talk about it during their next meeting in September 2023:
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BOOK DESCRIPTION: A Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.
As these characters’ stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.
Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists, it truly becomes its title.
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Copies of Hell of a Book can be picked up from the Book Discussion Shelf on our first floor, and it’s available digitally as an ebook (through Overdrive/Libby) and an audiobook (through Overdrive/Libby).
An in-person discussion of Hell of a Book will be held at the library on Tuesday, September 12, at 7:00 PM. No registration is required to attend.
And an online discussion of the book will be held via Zoom on Thursday, September 14, at 3:00 PM. If you’d like to attend the online discussion, please register through our Event Calendar. Participants will receive an email with the login information for Zoom after registering.
Published on August 11, 2023.
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